Tag: Millwall

It was a story that smelt off from the very start. The story of the shady arrangement to sell land immediately surrounding Millwall’s home, The New Den, has been bubbling away since September and today it was confirmed that Lewisham Council has abandoned these plans. It is a significant victory for the club, which had confirmed that it may have had to leave the borough altogether, had it gone through. Moreover, though, it is a victory for the power of protest from supporters who refused to be fobbed off by the council that seemed to hold both them and...

After two seasons away, Barnsley secured promotion back to the Football League Championship with a three-one win against Millwall at Wembley yesterday afternoon. There was an element of surprise about this result. After all, Millwall had only been relegated at the end of the season before and had finished the League One season in fourth place in the table, having secured their play-off spot with more than a little room to spare despite having had a rocky period in the build-up to Christmas which saw the club drop to tenth place in the table. Barnsley, on the other hand,...

It’s now been three years since Millwall Football Club – the players, the officials and the supporters – went out to bat for its community. Football clubs have never felt more detached from the areas in which they’re based, but throughout the 2012/13 season the club was at the forefront of a campaign to save the Accident & Emergency unit at Lewisham Hospital. Players warmed up before matches in t-shirts protesting the proposed closure of the unit, whilst the the club itself used the extra exposure that it received as a result of an FA Cup Fourth Round draw...

Perhaps it is appropriate that, at the end of a week that reminded many of us of the terrible state of English football during the 1980s and how close we came to all being exposed to our civil liberties being dragged through the mud, chewed up and spat back out at us, we were handed a throwback to those times. This afternoon at Wembley Stadium Wigan Athletic achieved a unique achievement, the first club to reach the finals of both the FA Trophy and the FA Cup, but there will be few headlines devoted to that club tomorrow morning. Instead, just as they are on these pages this evening, tomorrow’s football headlines will be hogged by Millwall Football Club – or, at least, the proportion of the club’s support that seems more than happy to treat any occasion of this nature as an opportunity to pick a fight with somebody, for some reason, presumably. It’s easy, at this stage, to point fingers at the concept of “Millwall”, but the scenes beamed across the world from Wembley this afternoon are something that the majority of supporters of the club – as well as the club itself, we might well presume – would want nothing to do with. Perhaps, for most of us, to try and rationalise the behaviour of those that get themselves into such situations is to chase up...

The FA Cup, then, will reach one hundred straight years without a non-league club reaching its quarter-finals. It was in 1914 that Queens Park Rangers, then of the Southern League, made it that far before losing by two goals to one against Liverpool at Anfield. Much has changed since then, but there was a feeling in the air that perhaps, just perhaps, Luton Town, who had already beaten Championship and Premier League opponents in this year’s competition in the form of Wolverhampton Wanderers and Norwich City, could equal them. This afternoon at Kenilworth Road, however, Millwall were too strong, too economical and too professional for them, and it is the club from the Football League Championship that has filled the first place in this year’s FA Cup quarter-final draw. Since the draw was made, of course, much has been made of the 1985 FA Cup quarter-final match between the two sides that ended in a pitched battle between the police in front of the television cameras of the BBC and resulted in the much-hated – and eventually rejected, apart from at Luton, where the club’s Tory MP owner introduced it anyway – proposal of ID card membership scheme for supporters. Never mind the fact that the two clubs had played each other fourteen times since then without any significant incidents occurring. The world, if you believed some columnists, was...